Canadian composer

My first evening at Chetham’s International Summer School ad Festival for Pianists – or Chets – as it is affectionately called, offered me the opportunity not only to meet piano friends, make new connections and experience the unique Chets vibe, but also to enjoy three fine recitals by professional pianists, who are all members of the teaching faculty at this year’s summer school.

Canadian pianists Megumi Masaki is a keen advocate of contemporary and new piano music, with a specialisation in exploring interactions between sound, image and movement. Her concert featured three works which used electronics and live video art to create a unique audio-visual and multi-sensory experience. Two works, ‘Corona’ and ‘Touch’, by Canadian composer Keith Hamel opened and closed the recital. Both utilise electronics, gesture tracking, interactive visuals and interactive computer processing and the live electronics and visuals react to one another so that each performance is unique. ‘Corona’ depends on the sound of the piano to create the visuals (an abstract sequence of shapes suggesting the planets) and because the video is generated by the piano and is completely interactive, each performance is unique. Musically, this piece had shimmering filigree passages redolent of Debussy and the processional quality of John Adams’ ‘China Gates’, but the additional layers of sound created by the electronics created mesmerising almost orchestral textures. Throughout, Megumi’s clarity and precision of touch and musical sense was clear, making this piece atmospheric and uplifting.

Keith Hamel’s ‘Touch’ utilised similar technology, with the addition of balletic gestures by the pianist to create wondrous shimmers of sound. The work is inspired by bells and all the harmonic material is derived from the analysis of bells and change-ringing patterns. Once again, the piano sound combined with the electronics offered beautiful haloes and extraordinary layers of sound.

These two works book-ended another piece by a Canadian composer. Douglas FINCH’s ‘Epiphanies’ is inspired by the short stories of Alice Munro in which a character has a moment of sudden inspiration or revelation which happens at unexpected times in the narrative. Compared to Keith Hamel’s pieces, this suite of four movements had a spare elegance and understated grace, and the interplay between piano and words, with live interactive visuals by artist Sigi Torinus, was engaging and at times unsettling, almost portentous.

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The second concert of the evening gave me my first experience of Stoller Hall, Chetham’s new multi-million pound concert venue. It’s a really beautiful contemporary shoebox hall, light and airy and finished with pale wood and stone, with an impressive acoustic. This was the setting for Norwegian pianist Einar Steen-Neckleberg’s performance of Bach’s remarkable Goldberg Variations – one of the high Himalayan peaks of the piano repertoire and an epic journey for player and audience. This was a highly personal and romantic account, with each movement shaped to highlight its individual character. This had the effect of suggesting each movement was a stand-alone work in its own right, and was particularly effective in the G-minor variations, especially the last one, which had a poignant intimacy. When the Aria returned, it was as if it came from another place, yet was wholly familiar.

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The final concert of the evening given by Bobby Chen and Douglas Finch in repertoire for two pianos. I have heard this piano duo before and I was once impressed by their pitch perfect timing and precision and musical understanding, so much so that one forgets there are two pianists playing as the music is given absolute priority. Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 1 was lush, liquid and transparent, with elegant natural phrasing and a wonderful sense of ease, which I am sure comes from deep familiarity with the work and a special synergy between the two pianists. The second work was by the little known English composer Arnold Griller (look out for a new disc of his music on the Toccata Classics label for which Douglas Finch wrote the liner notes). His ‘Introduction, Cakewalk and Allegro’ opened with a rather sensuous section, redolent of 1920s cocktail jazz, before lively sections with rhythms reminiscent of ragtime and shifting moods, at times witty, then serious. It was vibrant and colourful and handled with understated panache by the performers. The final work, ‘Hapsburg Burlesques’ by Douglas Finch, was written at the time of the Brexit referendum and includes quotations and transcriptions of Rosenkavalier, Mahagonny, When You Wish Upon a Star, Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet, and even the British National Anthem. With its intricate weaving of recognisable themes and rather decadent character, this work was both stylish and slightly surreal, but without any sense of irony or pastiche. For an encore, Bobby and Douglas performed Rossignols, written as a wedding dedication, and based on Granados’ The Maiden and the Nightingale, from Goyescas, a delicate, intimate miniature.

“Listening to music, for me, is like inhabiting a landscape – an inner world, bounded by an intricate web of feelings, memories, expectations and associations that are brought to life through the properties of sound and rhythm” – Douglas Finch

Inner Landscapes, the first ever recording of composer and pianist Douglas Finch’s piano and chamber music, is a compelling collection of ten works which capture an ‘inner world’ of a particular landscape – in Canada, Germany, North Wales and New York. Finch was drawn to the art of Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945), who has long been one of his favourite painters, in particular for her landscape paintings of the west coast of British Columbia which evoke feelings of “loneliness and quiet rapture”, and his music explores similar themes of solitude, mourning and spiritual longing.

Performed by Canadian flautist Lisa Nelsen, pianist Aleksander Szram, cellist Caroline Szram, and violinists Mieko Kanno and Toby Tramaseur, the music spans Finch’s compositional output from his early 20s, when he lived in Canada, to the present, after he moved to the UK in 1993. A renowned improviser, most of the pieces on this debut CD grew out of ideas resulting from his improvisations.

I recently heard British pianist Steven Osborne perform music by Morton Feldman, and I was immediately struck by a similar stillness and sense of time suspended in Douglas Finch’s music, with its carefully chosen and exquisitely placed sounds, delicate droplets of notes, plangent bass interjections and haunting melodic fragments. The piano’s resonance and decay is used to great effect – elusive and meditative in Ruins (1984) ‘Calm’, or declamatory and insistent in ‘Quick March’. In the last movement of Ruins, Finch takes the circling fragment from ‘Die Krähe’ from Schubert’s Winterreise to create his own Winter’s journey – a piece inspired by a gloomy day walking around an old castle on the Rhine, whose spare instrumentation and spooling melodies reflect the desolation of Schubert’s winter traveler. Other pieces on the disc have some kind of relation to a particular place: ‘Fantasy on a Russian Folk Song’ emerged out of the North Wales coastal town of Pwllheli – “practically the whole of the wildly ecstatic final section came to me while walking on the beach during a fierce gale” (DF). I am familiar with this part of North Wales, having holidayed there frequently as a child, and for me the music expresses the rugged, landscape, long empty beaches and changeable weather.

The three ‘Chorales’ on the disc reference the Lutheran Chorale tradition of J S Bach and Cesar Franck, and utilise the piano’s unique nuance and decay. Fragmentary, terse, and introspective, they express in their briefness a profound sense of contemplation, solitude and lamentation. It is the restraint in this music that makes it particularly arresting.

The launch of Inner Landscapes is on Monday 20 June at The Forge, Camden. Drinks from 7pm, performance at 7.30 to include selections from the CD and improvisations by Douglas Finch. Further information and tickets

Inner Landscapes is available from Prima Facie Records. CD notes by Douglas Finch and Aleksander Szram

Who or what inspired you to take up composing, and make it your career?

I can’t remember exactly, but I just got more and more into music as a child – hearing my mother play the piano, listening to my parents’ collection of vinyl recordings of Chopin, Beethoven etc., improvising along with my paternal grandmother on the piano: sort of soft jazzy honky-tonk type things. Before I could read music (I started lessons quite late) I would experimentally fill up music paper with random notes and try to get my mother, or my neighbour down the street in Winnipeg to try to play it for me. Eventually I figured out how to make it sound better, and started to be able to play the stuff myself. When I was about nine, I remember announcing at the dinner table to my parents and two sisters that I wanted to become a composer, if not a psychologist, which was my second choice. But I ended up becoming a pianist first.

Who or what were the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?

Though I’m mostly self-taught as a composer, I received encouragement and help from S.C. Eckhardt-Gramatté and Peter-Paul Koprowski, and my musical and aesthetic grounding was greatly influenced by my piano teacher William Aide. My mother introduced me to lots of books when I was young – from ‘Wind in the Willows’ to novels by Joyce Carol Oates. I think this helped me develop creative instincts. Though I never got to meet him, Glenn Gould – with all his individuality and eccentricity – had a profound effect on me growing up. As far as the musical canon is concerned, the inventiveness, depth, and universality of Beethoven’s music grabbed me in my teenage years, and still does. I think of him as the beginning of the modern musical age. My personal interpretation of the term ‘modernism’ is that the individual voice of the composer can deliver ‘truths’ which have a value beyond their fashionability, enjoyability or marketability. There is also J.S. Bach and Mozart, of course, and Schubert, Schumann and Chopin are recurring passions. Of the more recent composers, Bartok, Shostakovich, Ives, Messaien, Xenakis, Weill, (pre-America), Ustwolskaya, Vivier, Feldman, Janacek and Mompou have all offered something special to me. Ronald Stevenson, who I am fortunate to have gotten to know in the last few years, has been an inspiration not just because of his own music (including his masterful Passacaglia on DSCH) but also through his open-mindedness to a wide range of lesser-known music which he’s shared with me – including some wonderful choral folksong arrangements by Percy Grainger.
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

As a player, performing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2, Ives’ Concord Sonata and Beethoven’s op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. Those experiences (including the task of memorising) helped develop my imagination and sense of structure – not only for composing, but for improvising. Balancing a career performing and composing has itself been a challenge, and I’m still trying to grapple with that. Improvising, besides being an artistic end in itself, has played a mediating role in this inner conflict. Perhaps one of my biggest challenges as a composer was finishing my first ‘opus’ – a piano sonata – in my last year at Juilliard, when I was also busy entering international competitions as a pianist. It was a kind of act of faith to switch gears in this way and start composing seriously. If my improvisation class teacher hadn’t taken me aside and said to me ‘look, from what I’ve heard you do, I think you should consider becoming a composer’, I may never have taken that plunge. It was the last, and practically the only thing he ever said to me in that class, and I’m still grateful for that. My first film soundtrack (Painted Angels, Jon Sanders dir.1999) scored for chamber orchestra was a similar plunge in the dark – very stressful yet exhilarating. From a curatorial perspective, the few festivals I’ve organised posed different challenges – perhaps the most hair-raising being the biggest ever Frederic Rzewski retrospective ever mounted – the first day beginning with the first (and only?) complete performance of his solo piano work ‘The Road’, lasting ten hours. His big compliment to me at the end of the two weeks was to say I was ‘one of the crazy people’.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working on a commissioned piece?

I haven’t had many commissions, but I particularly enjoy it when there is an element of collaboration. My Viola Concerto (Night Love Song) which was premiered in Toronto last year had two collaborative angles – firstly, working directly with Rivka Golani developing the viola part and secondly working with musical and historical/mythical material from the Blackfoot – specifically the ‘Blood’ tribe in Alberta.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles and orchestras?

Well, Rivka who I just mentioned was (and is) very inspiring. I also recently worked with a young Canadian pianist, now studying in Germany, Everett Hopfner who played my Preludes and Afterthoughts – fantasy-transcriptions on Chopin’s Preludes op. 28 across Canada after winning the É-Gré Competition in Brandon – Canada’s most important competition for contemporary music. To feel such enthusiasm and empathy from a young performer just starting out in his career is something that really lifts the spirit. I guess these are the positive experiences, which I tend to remember and look forward to. What I can find a bit difficult to deal with at times is when performers don’t try to read between the notes on the page – to go beyond the score and ‘interpret it’, which is after all what performers are meant to do!
Which works are you most proud of?

Usually the one I’ve just finished – in this case Three Chorales for piano (which Aleksander Szram will be recording next year as part of a CD of some of my piano and chamber music). I just hope that I can keep developing.

Do you have a favourite concert venue?

I’ve never thought about that much. But one of the worst, I think, was a place that used to be called the ‘Communist Club’ in Warsaw. I played a concert there on an abominable piano in 1980 during the Chopin Competition. I was told afterwards that Richter had just come to town a couple of weeks earlier and asked to give an impromptu recital there. That humbled me!

Who are your favourite musicians/composers?

I mentioned some earlier, but out of the myriad musicians I admire, I’ll also say Rudolph Serkin and Sergiu Celibidace.
What is your most memorable concert experience?

Hearing Jesse Norman sing Wagner’s Liebestod and Strauss’ Four Last Songs with an orchestra in London, Ontario when I was about 19. It wasn’t just the singing, which was overwhelming enough, but her stage-presence, and the magisterial slowness of her entrance.

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

Try to be open-minded. Opinions are easy to form, and aren’t worth much. But you also have to learn discernment. This might seem paradoxical, but there is a fine balance required – the kind of thing that Zen philosophy seems to be dealing with.

Be generous to others, and as far as possible disinterested in your dealings – doing things for the betterment of the art of music and society rather than entirely for your own career. I think James MacMillan shows an admirably healthy attitude in his interview for this series when he says he never thought of music as a ‘career’.
What are you working on at the moment?

A piece for erhu (a 2-stringed Chinese ‘violin’) and piano for a Canadian duo.
Where would you like to be in 10 years’ time?

Somewhere where I could experience both solitude and friendship in equal measure.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Solitude and friendship. And, more specifically, lying on a nice quiet beach somewhere with my wife and two daughters.

What is your most treasured possession?

Music.

What do you enjoy doing most?

Making music.

What is your present state of mind?

Tired, happy and just a little uneasy

Douglas Finch was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and began improvising, composing and performing on the piano from an early age with the help of his mother. He later continued studying with Winnifred Sim, Jean Broadfoot and at the University of Western Ontario with William Aide. After receiving a Masters from Juilliard in New York under Beveridge Webster, Douglas won several awards and was a finalist at the Queen Elisabeth International Piano Competition in Brussels.

After moving to London, he co-founded The Continuum Ensemble in 1994 and has collaborated in premiering many new works. He appears regularly with the ensemble at the Spitalfields and other Festivals and at the Southbank Centre, featuring composers such as Julian Anderson, Georges Aperghis, Henri Dutilleux, Charles Ives, Claude Vivier, Errollyn Wallen, Iannis Xenakis and many others.

He has composed for piano, chamber ensemble, orchestra, theatre and film and his score for the feature film ‘Painted Angels’ , was described in The Independent as ‘an extraordinary triumph of artistic will’.

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